Remember Me In Colors
by litvirg
Summary: Clarke wakes up without her memories. She has no recollection of going to the ground. All she remembers are flashes of colors, and a grumbling voice in the back of her head that she can't quite place. Will that be enough to get her home?


She woke up in the mud.

It was pressed up in her nose, caking her hair. She wiped a hand down her cheek, scraping it off her face, pushing it away from her eyes. Lifting her head she looked around, eyes raking over her surroundings trying to figure out where she was.

Green and brown. That's all there was. Green and brown.

She dug her fingers into the ground, squishing them in the mud. It was thick and smelly and grayer than she ever thought mud would be. Green and brown and gray. Clarke shook her hand, and watched the mud fly off and land with a _thwap_ against the trunk of a tree a few feet off.

Pushing herself up off the ground she noticed the sky filtering in between the leaves. It was bluer than anything she had ever known.

_"Relax Princess,"_ a gruff memory called to her. _"The sky's nothing new to us."_

It was right, the voice whispering in the front of her mind. The sky was nothing new to her. It was everything she knew. She just didn't know it from down here.

Green and brown and gray and blue.

She'd been walking for three days. She'd stopped at a river once to wash herself off. She watched the mud, which had dried and cracked on her skin start soften and slip off of her skin, floating into the water and then sinking down to the gray rocks beneath the surface. Blue and gray and brown.

She saw flashes of a girl splashing in the water, smiling one moment pushing her arms back and forth, testing how it felt against her skin. Then she was being dragged and pulled down, reaching out toward a rock where a hand stretched out to grab her.

She shook her head, pushing the image of the unknown girl aside, and stripped of her jacket and moved to unbutton her jeans and slip them down her hips.

_"Warn me if the water's cold, will ya Princess?"_ she heard the voice again, this time with a flash of the back of a head, floppy brown hair bobbing up and down.

"Leave me alone," she grumbled, pulling her shirt off and sinking into the water, relishing the foreign feeling of the water lapping over her arms. She hissed as she sank deep, the cold water shocking her body.

"It's definitely cold," she told the voice.

_"Well hurry up,"_ it said. _"Then we can get back to camp."_

"I'm going, I'm going. Don't get your knockers in a twist," she said to the air. She rubbed her hands up and down her body, scraping the mud and the blood away from her skin layer by layer. It swirled into the murky water. Blue and brown and gray and red. She poked at it until it all turned one color. She rubbed the thick mixture off on a rock as she climbed back out and pulled her clothes back on.

It looked brown. For some reason she didn't want to walk away from it. She picked up the rock and rubber her finger back in the around, keeping the warm brown mud streaked on her wrist before she tossed it into the river, and kept on walking.

It was the dreams that made her change course.

She had no real memories of anything after her father's execution. When she was awake, all she had were flashes of colors and the gruff voice she couldn't quite place in the back of her mind.

She knew she was on the ground, that much had been clear since she woke up six days ago. Other than that, her mind was blank. White.

The colors that flashed around her during the day took shape in her dreams. Flaps of red tarp clung to rusted and warped metal, flashing the light of the sun—the sun—off the sides, shining light on whichever face walked by.

Sharp nose. High cheek bones. Jet black hair.

Floppy brown hair. Wide white smile. Goofy grin.

Dark Brown hair, stuck to an olive skinned neck. Black leather shining in the sun, reflecting back to the metal.

It was the camp the boy in her head told her about. Tents and huts. Brown and red and green and black. The flowers were an electric blue in her dreams. They shone in the nighttime, gathered along all the doorways and tent flaps, lighting the path through camp at night.

She had seen those flowers on the other side of the river she washed in. They were clustered along the side trickling back into the woods, a path leading her in the opposite direction. She waded through the water, knocking rocks into the river as she climbed out.

She was chasing a dream. She was following a flower to chase a dream. But as she reached her hand on a warm black rock, she felt instead a warm black leather beneath her skin so she pushed herself up and followed the lightning blue path.

_"We're on earth now Princess,"_ she heard behind her as she hurried on, deeper into the trees. _"You can slow down, the flowers aren't going anywhere."_

She had a brown leather band on her wrist and sharp silver knife tucked in her belt. Each morning she woke up and cut a notch in her wristband. Sixteen days.

_"Morning Princess,"_ she heard, whispered into her ear. _"Careful with that knife."_

She pressed her hand into the worn leather, breathing in deeply. It smelled of home, felt of home. She pressed her lips to the warm leather, feeling the dark brown melt against her skin. It even looked like home.

_"Alright, alright, don't get all weird on me now,"_ his voice dripped over her mind. _"It's just a bracelet. Took about five minutes to make."_

His voice popped up more and more. Every morning she'd open her eyes, press herself away from the dirt and the moss she was sleeping on, make one more notch in her bracelet, and wait until she heard the daily _"Morning Princess,"_ before slipping her knife back in her belt, and keeping on the trail of flowers.

They were memories, she knew that. It wasn't a voice she could imagine on her own. And everything he said rang in her mind like something she'd heard before.

She'd press on until about midday when his voice would ring like a reminder in her ears_. "You gotta eat something, Princess. You're no good to us if you're too weak to stand."_

"Us," he'd always say. Clarke squeezed her eyes shut and tried to remember the "us" that he meant. She saw two goofy smiles attached to boys huddled over a computer, and two girls, one with braids running across her head, one with a sleek pointy tail and a red leather jacket.

Mostly she saw brown. Brown and black and olive skin.

Never a face though.

When the sun went down she'd find a quiet spot, nestled between the trees and she'd feel his whisper on her skin.

_"Try and get some rest, Princess."_

Her dreams weren't just colors. They were faces. A boy with floppy hair in a green t-shirt. The girl with the braids in a purple tank top. A mop of black hair resting about sharp cheekbones and dark eyes in a blue polo. A red leather jacket on a girl with big brown eyes.

And a man in a black leather jacket hugging a gray shirt, brown freckles spattered across olive skin.

And voices, she'd start to hear their voices. They all said the same thing. Just her name.

All but him. He never spoke in her dreams, and she woke each morning wondering if she'd ever learn the sound of his voice, or if he'd stay a mix of brown and black and gray. But then she'd hear the man say _"Morning Princess,"_ and she'd put a notch in her wristband, and she'd thank the stars for the color brown.

His voice stopped making sense. She'd been hearing him for twenty four days. It started off with a comment here or there about what she was doing. She'd stopped to sit in a field of wild yellow flowers one day, amazed at their color.

_"Come on, Princess."_ She felt the ghost of a tug on her hair. _"It's not like you've never seen gold before."_

She'd stop on a ledge or an overlook and lose her breath at the skyline, and she'd have to sit down. The wind would brush against the small of her back and she'd remember him teasing her.

_"Take a picture Princess, we've got things to do."_

He started lingering longer and longer throughout the day. Reminding her to do things she couldn't possibly do out here on her own.

_"Keep an eye on Octavia, would you? She's getting restless and she won't listen to me."_

_"Remember to talk to Monty about giving the young ones moonshine, alright? I'm all for letting loose, but it's getting a little out of hand."_

_"Wait here, I need to talk to you."_

_"Stop dismissing the guards I put outside your tent. They're there for a reason."_

_"Stop by my tent later okay? I've got something I want to show you."_

Endlessly for two days she heard him order her about (though order wasn't the right word, not really. He sounded exasperated, desperate for her to listen to him), telling her to do things with people who were only vague shadows to her, flashes of colors, parks of laughter, brief glances of faces.

She was confused and annoyed at first. Mostly she was frustrated. She wanted to listen to him, wanted to do what he asked. Wanted to take any tiny bit of desperation out of his voice. Work as a partner.

But she couldn't. She was out wandering the woods alone, desperate for her own partner.

After the two days of ordering her around, he started just talking to her. About nothing and anything and everything. Sometimes when he would speak she would feel the warmth of a big orange fire by her legs, and the glow of the silver stars soaking down on her head.

_"I was thinking we should make a trip to the bunker one of these days. You've done enough for the camp to take a day or two off, and I squirreled away some art supplies I found down there last time, though you might want them."_

_"I don't know why you're worried about me, Princess. It's just a little head scrape. I'll be up and back to being a pain in your ass in no time."_

_"I thought I was going to lose her, I really thought… You have…no idea. You've…you didn't just save Octavia. I don't know what I would've done if it wasn't for you. Thank you, Princess."_

_"I'm glad you're here Princess."_

_"Hurry back."_

_"You can't just disappear like that, Clarke!"_

_"Here, I grabbed an apple for you. You should eat something."_

_"You gotta wake up, Princess. You gotta wake up and rule your people. I can't do this without you."_

He would go from saying random, insignificant things about moonshine and apples and jokes at her expense, or even gossip about Octavia; to thanking her for standing by him, and moments like that she could feel his voice around her, could almost see it. A golden honey brown dripping into her, pushing her feet further and further down the path.

On the thirtieth day, she matched the faces in her dreams up with the names he kept mentioning to her.

On the thirty first day, she heard him laugh in her dream, and it glowed like the sun over the tops of the trees.

On the thirty second day she woke up in cold sweats, finally remembering how she got lost out here in the first place.

_They were hunting—she and Bellamy (Bellamy. Bellamy. Bell.)—when they heard the grounder horn. Their camp had been at a tentative stand still with the neighboring grounder clans; no peace had been made but neither side wanted to be the one to shoot first. _

_They didn't have to ask each other, they moved together without hesitation, running back in the direction of camp. They needed to be fast, they had their people to think about but Clarke was so tired, hadn't slept in days, and Bellamy couldn't imagine she was anywhere but running home beside him so it took a few moments longer than usual before he realized she had fallen behind. _

_He stopped and started running back to grab her. He threw her over his shoulder, not worried about being careful as long as it would get them both home. But they'd delayed too long and they were surround by grounders. She saw one raise the blunt end of a spear and knock Bellamy out with it before they grabbed her and threw her over a horse. _

_Dangling off the horse she saw Bellamy lying in a heap on the ground. They weren't too far from camp, and if she could get them to turn the other way, then he and the hundred might have a shot. _

_She shot her leg out, smacking the jaw of the man on the horse, startling him enough that she could push him off the horse. Then she swung her leg around, straddling the horse and took off running in the opposite direction. She had no idea where she was going, all she could think was away, away, away…_

_They gave chase for about an hour, but she kept running just to be sure. Then the sound of a thunder clap startled the horse, who bucked her off. She landed on the dirt smacking her head. The next morning she woke up in mud. _

She woke up, slick with sweat but shivering. It was barely dawn, but there was a little light, so she got up, made a notch in her bracelet and waited.

_"Morning, Princess,_" he said finally.

"I'm coming home, Bell. I swear. I'm gonna make it home today."

_"Well, hurry up."_

It was all green on her way back. She knew the route now, she remembered. And she flew through it and couldn't see anything but green, green, green…

Until it was brown.

A huge, towering wall of brown, wooden planks and she yelled at them to open the gates, and she couldn't help but laugh because she had never noticed before how beautiful the color brown was, and there were tears leaking out of her eyes when she saw a figure clad in black and gray emerge, with brown hair covering his forehead, whose brown eyes were wide open, whose pink lips split in a smile and whose warm olive skin wrapped around her and squeezed.

"Don't do that again, Princess," the voice whispered. Except it was real this time, it was his voice and his breath was truly ghosting down her neck as he pressed the lips he just used to scold her onto her shoulder and then her collar bone and her chin and her forehead and then her lips, and she shut her eyes and all she saw was brown.

Brown and black and gray and brown.


End file.
